THE TEAM QUICKLY DECIDED WHAT material their presentation would cover, and split the topic into three sections.

Justin: "Eric and I are going to be explaining about the organisms, the only organisms, that can live in the hot and acid conditions of the hot pots... their characteristics, their history, who first discovered them. It's like a third phylogenera - there are prokaryotes, there are eukaryotes, and then there is the Archaea, which are different."

Jamie: I'm going to be explaining the pH levels, which consists of the acidity levels in the thermal features and hot pots, and what kinds of organisms survive there, in what concentrations of acid. Like, there's one stream that starts out cold and non-acid, and trout live there. But farther down, hot acid water from hot springs flows into the springs, and you no longer find trout in there."

Tom: "Basically I'm talking about what kinds of temperatures living things can survive in, both multicellular and unicellular... unicellular creatures can live in much greater extremes, both hot and cold, than multicellular animals can."

At their workstations, each of the team's journalist-explorers collected material and began to shape their presentations. They were under some pressure, because tomorrow they were going to Yellowstone with a party of biologists who were collecting life samples from hot springs there... and the day after that, they would give their presentation.